Originally published April 19, 2013 at 12:00 pm
Updated April 20, 2013 at 12:54 pm

Vicki Scuri is an environmental designer who uses her own Lake Forest Park garden to test plants and drainage solutions. What has she learned so far? More than she’d like to about maintenance.

An old juniper hedge, pruned like an undulating dragon’s back, divides the more formal garden above from the naturalistic plantings down the slope.

Stone paths lure visitors down into the garden and, when viewed from the deck above, reveal patterns. One of Scuri’s favorite curly willows is in the background; daisies and day lilies bloom in the foreground.

Ferns, hydrangeas and pots of ornamental grasses soften the narrow, old terrace that leads to the front door.

Hosta ‘Gold Standard’ brightens the garden beneath banana trees. The place is so lush it’s hard to believe that eight years ago it looked like a moonscape.

The hardy banana trees towering over the back garden are tall enough in summer to visually link the house above to the garden it overlooks.

The rock-lined swale is both design feature and effective rain garden. It soaks up runoff in this wet, steep-slope garden. Glass floats further the look of a dry streambed.

A stone path (with gaps for drainage) is lined in ornamental grasses and hostas paired with hardy fuchsias.

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She first tackled daunting drainage issues, connecting downspouts through plastic pipes and running them into trenches Also a rock-lined swale now soaks up excess water.

WHEN VICKI Scuri bought her classic 1950s home in Lake Forest Park eight years ago, its hillside garden was a fright of poodle-ball-shaped shrubs and serious drainage issues. From Scuri’s back deck, she looked down at weeds, ratty lawn and a ditch as raw and ragged as if a big bite had been taken out of the garden. An environmental designer, Scuri put her landscape-restoration experience to good use transforming the muddy, messy space into a lushly planted rain garden.

The front garden was a narrow slot running between house and sidewalk, thickly hedged in overgrown juniper. Below the house was a hillside of saturated soil and standing water; traffic noise from nearby Bothell Way was clearly audible. “It was just really ugly, like a moonscape, nothing grew in the wet clay,” Scuri says.

The streetside garden above the house was easier to fix. Scuri planted her parking strip in dwarf lilacs and bulbs for springtime cheer. She updated the junipers by sculpting them into an undulating hedge. “I kept the juniper as a period piece, a reference to the era of the house,” Scuri explains. She took advantage of the only flat space on the property, furnishing the entry terrace with table, chairs and pots of fragrant daphne, ornamental grasses and rosemary.

Around back, the daunting drainage issues came first. Scuri connected the home’s downspouts through plastic pipes, running them into trenches to distribute runoff through the garden. She created a rock-lined swale that meanders the width of the garden to soak up excess water. “It’s a good low-maintenance feature,” says Scuri, who has studded the rocks with glass floats that look as if they may have drifted down a stream.

Scuri’s home perches high above the back garden, with window walls and a big deck. So she patterned the space below with stone pathways and wide ribbons of plantings that read well from above. “The paths are a meditation walk for me,” says Scuri. “It’s easy to forget about the highway noise when you wind your way down in the garden.”

Being a designer, Scuri loves the shapes of plants, choosing curly locust, weeping trees, spiky grasses and dramatic, colorful foliage plants. As she did in the front garden, Scuri clipped clumps of old juniper tams into serpentine walls. In summer, huge, hardy banana trees (Musa basjoo) dominate the scene. Masses of hosta and sweeps of Japanese forest grass are interspersed with dark ribbons of ‘Plum Pudding’ and ‘Chocolate Ruffles’ heuchera.

To cut down on maintenance, Scuri carefully chooses plants that match her garden’s conditions: ferns in the boggy grotto, bulbs and annuals in the well-drained, sunny areas at the top of the slope.

Scuri, who considers her whole property to be a demo garden for her work, balances easier-care grasses and evergreens with the naturalism of self-seeding poppies and columbine. Hauling in compost and mulch has paid off with productive, worm-filled soil. “And I understand much, much more about maintenance issues,” she says.

After years of hard work, Scuri has created a garden that’s a source of calm and respite. “I chill out and wander through the garden to work out ideas,” she says. “Gardening gets me unstuck.”

Valerie Easton is a Seattle freelance writer. Check out her blog at www.valeaston.com. Mike Siegel is a Seattle Times staff photographer.

Valerie Easton: valeaston@comcast.net. Valerie Easton is a former horticultural librarian who writes about gardens and houses and the people who make them ... when she isn't busy adding yet more plants to her garden on Whidbey Island. In two decades of writing her weekly garden column for Pacific NW magazine, she has never met a gardener who wasn’t eager to talk about weather.